The browser registers the font, but the font is not immediately availabe to the browser. FOIT. Each font files could be ~100KB per weight/variation of the font, we have 12 files, about to be 14!

Perceived performance = poor.

After our re-factor is done, each css is actually just referencing fall back font stack, so no FOIT. Contents are rendered and immediately readable in a fall back font. For example, our National fonts will appear as Helvetica or Arial.

We’ll use fontfaceobserver.js to check to see if the fonts have been loaded, then add .fonts-loaded class to html tag as successful callback.

CSS rules will look like this (* this is grossly simplified css, but you get the point)

On the subsequent request though, I am hoping that server can just add .fonts-loaded class to the html tag. For now, we can bake this right into js/cookie, but eventually we would like to work with backend.

Another thing that Wilto uncovered was Foundation out of the box prefers optimizeLegibility as default text-rendering. Just switching this paragraph setting to optimizeSpeed and headers (i.e h1, h2, h3 etc) to auto, we made almost a full second perceived performance improvement on the slower network. Did not know that made that kind of impact.

Bocoup’s OpenVis conference is by far my favorite conference of all time. I was only able to go one day in 2014, but I participated fully in 2013 and 2015, and I’ve loved every session. Before I forget (which I did last year…) I am going to write down/copy over my notes here.

It is almost here. A fun, friendly one-day hacking/coding/designing competition for baseball fans. If you have not signed up yet, it is not too late, follow this link

MLB.com is graciously back as our sponsor, continuing our four-year partnership. We are happy to report that winning teams of each local Baseball Hack Day will win an annual MLB.TV Premium subscription! Also the winners of each city will be judged for Baseball Hack Day grand prize, RBI Baseball 15, and major bragging rights.

Not interested in competing? No problem. To encourage participation of developers and designers of all levels, there will be three tracks? (*In Boston)?:

“Hacking track” is our usual, Baseball Hack Day track. You come with a project and recruit people, or come and find a project to join and work on it for the day.

“Project track,” we’ll have a project/challenge ready to be worked on. There will be a “project manager” who will lead the team(s) to solve the challenge.

“Learning track” is designed for first-time hackathon attendees (no coding experience necessary). This is where you can learn how to hack from our mentor volunteers. This will be less competitive and more like a workshop. You will be eligible for the “Rookie of the Year” award!

Anyone that knows me heard me say “Embrace the fluidity of the web!”. Atomic Web Design is a concept that I always circle back to whenever I’m talking about web. I am also a big fan of sass, and also of Zurb Foundation.

HBR’s pattern-lab work flow

Instead of installing all our dependencies — such as php and apache for pattern lab, ruby and compass for css preprocessor and node for grunt and bower — into each of our individual computers, we have a Vagrant/VirtualBox virtual machine that are committed in our github repo.

What is really nice about Vagrant is its pass-through file system. Meaning you can edit the file on your OS (be it Mac, Windows, or Linux) using your favorite text editor locally (without going through virtual window), and it can be accessed by both host and virtual machine.

So we edit our www/source/scss folder, and www/source/_pattern folder right on our machines. Then, with power of grunt, you can view your changes appear on your browser, served right from your VM.

After we like what we see on our local machine, we make a pull request (we commit the whole thing, Vagrant and everything) in github. We have a internal agreement that you don’t merge your own request… so it gets reviewed by peers and then, eventually, gets merged to the master branch.

Then our hardest working member of the team, Mr. Jenkins, who watches the changes on the master branch, sees that it changed. And he pulls the latest, compile sass, compile pattern lab, and then he puts the public folder part of the pattern lab onto our internally available web server (is “intranet” still a word?). This is our living style guide. Our backend developers uses it to grab markup code out of it. Designers and editors, as well as marketing people, can access it any time they want.

Only part that goes directly out of our pattern lab to production is compiled CSS (it gets minified on its way to our production). But CSS HAS TO BE EDITED IN pattern lab, which forces everyone to first create a new pattern inside our pattern lab. This also ensures that our style guide is most up to date. Win-win!

That’s basically our workflow. I understand that pattern lab is not the silver bullet that works for everyone, but I am pretty proud of how it turned out for us. Another nice thing about committing your entire dev environment in the repo like this, is, say, if you spilled a full glass of red wine on your MacBook Pro by accident (Oops!). All you have to do next day is to get a loaner from IT and download your text editor and you are right back at it. If I had to install node on my machine again ON A DEADLINE, I think I am going to cry. But anyhow…

One of the thing that I wanted to do was release public version of our pattern lab github repo. One without styles in it, and one that is a stand alone virtual machine which runs Pattern Lab.

And, lo and behold, (Thanks to Matt Wagner and Kevin Davis) we were able to release it. It is available for you to download.

Ruby on Rails is pretty cool. Pretty magical. If you need a site up for the duration of weekend hackathon, it is an amazing tool.

I had a pleasure of joining a team over the weekend on AthenaHealth’s More Disruption Please and MIT Hacking Medicine’s well-organized and well-funded hackathon. (Unfortunately my contributed github code is in a private repo… a bummer. I should have told them that open repo would be preferred… that’s the thing about some people’s approach of hackathon. But that is beside the point) Though I was only there for only the part of Saturday, I got a bit done and learned (and re-learned) a lot of things that I wanted to do, working with Ruby on Rails developers. I love working with smart people.
Here is my runnig notes. Probably doesn’t make sense, but I am hoping to revisit and edit later to make some sense, eventually make it into how to put Foundation SASS site working with Ruby on Rails backendContinue reading…

Helping an old friend with good cause making his website update much simpler and more efficient. WordPress site is even too complicated, but twitter was too simple (though probably could have done the job). What we decided to do was use Tumblr.

Using Tumblr API, I made this very simple jquery ajax jsonp call to get the posts, then dump it right on the site. Crude? Yes. But it does the job. First you need to get a key.

What happened there? After playing around with IE’s inspector, it seems the issue is with “min-height” rather than the flexbox itself.

So, if you give, say, a height: 1px; in the .flex-container-column, it works (then the height will be min-height). However, height of 100%, or height of auto will not. Mmmm.

So, I tried old trick featured on Chris Coyers site (Love CSS-Tricks!), but since it defaults to auto, it still doesn’t work.

Setting height would work, for example in the pen above, if you comment out line 14 in css (height: 250px;), flex would behave as expected. But since now the height is set, and not flexible, say if the right-one div had a height of 300px, right-two div will disappear. We can’t have that.

What is wrong with css? [It’s] “an old, loose, leaky, globally-operating, inheritance-based language which is entirely dependent on source-order, except when you introduce its own worst feature: Specificity.”

That quote reminded me of a presentation at Boston CSS meetup, given by Bocoup’s Greg Smith: “CSS is Awful”.

Personally, I am a big fan/advocate/apologist for Zurb Foundation. I like it because, while it is true that the code gets bloated with some unused stuff/overrides and it is “trying to be all things for all men”, they actually do a good job of keeping it simple (relatively speaking), have great/flexible “settings” file, and best of all (this is true to a lot of open sourced projects) having a community of issues, discussion/solutions and a solid documentation. Since we have a small team, but everyone is hands-on, I think it is important that we can have some place where each developers can just look up something to see if this is some issue that people are having or not to trouble shoot. Anyway, great presentation and was inspiring. I love CSS!

But Harry has a good point, why do people geeks wear jQuery t-shirts but almost never zurb foundation t-shirts? I’d wear it :)